Swedish Pirate Party headed to European Parliament

Elections for the European Parliament wrapped up today, and preliminary …

The final returns are still being counted, but Sweden's Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) has secured at least one seat in today's elections for the European Parliament. According to Sweden's election authority, the Pirate Party has crossed the four percent threshold needed for a seat and currently has 7.1 percent of the vote.

"We have just written political history," said Swedish Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge. "Tonight, politicians have learned that doing what the lobby asks will cost them their jobs. We're the largest party in the segment below 30 years of age. That's building the future of liberties."

With more than 700 legislators in the European Parliament (see the complete breakdown), a vote or two won't do much to set the agenda. But for a party formed only a few years ago with a narrow set of concerns, this is an excellent showing.

The Pirate Party has aspirations to be a worldwide movement, aspirations we discussed when we profiled the party several months ago. But the Party has had trouble gaining traction outside of Sweden. It was on the ballot in Germany this week as well, but only secured 0.9 percent of the vote there.

Still, that's good enough to cross the 0.5 percent threshold for government funding of a political party, and it means that the German Pirates should be better equipped next time around. Sweden's Pirate Party has already grabbed some government funding for its youth movement, Ung Pirat (Young Pirate), a move that didn't pass without controversy but has nonetheless continued.

The Swedish result makes the Pirate Party the fifth most popular in the country, and one of eight to have cleared the four percent threshold. It also shows the pirates beating more established parties like the Christian Democrats and the Centre Party.

So get ready, Brussels and Strasbourg—their numbers may be small, but the pirates are coming. And their strong showing among the young means that more will be arriving in the future.

Originally posted by d_jedi:Is this parliament based on a proportional representation system? My understanding is such a system allows all sorts of fringe groups to have a voice (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable).

It's proportional for all parties reaching a set threshold. The threshold is 4% in Sweden, not sure about other countries.

Originally posted by d_jedi:Is this parliament based on a proportional representation system? My understanding is such a system allows all sorts of fringe groups to have a voice (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable).

It's proportional for all parties reaching a set threshold. The threshold is 4% in Sweden, not sure about other countries.

5% in Germany. Such thresholds are pretty good at keeping fringe groups out. Until 1983 Germany had a three party system! We now have five, but they are by no means fringy.

Sure, low turnout certainly played a role, but getting above that threshold is significant.

Originally posted by d_jedi:Is this parliament based on a proportional representation system? My understanding is such a system allows all sorts of fringe groups to have a voice (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable).

Ok. I've officially had it with you and your blunt and attempted-subtle attacks on anything supporting "piracy" and file-sharing.

Seriously, it's ok if you want to voice your opinion, but have the decency to articulate it as your opinion and not as some revelation of fact, eg.

quote:

Originally posted by d_jedi:RIAA is entirely correct here.

And if you want to call them a fringe party, do that like a man instead of obliquely implying at it.Consider me trolled.

A small correction. In Sweden political youth groups are not part of the "mother party" and handles funding and membership independently. So the Pirate party in Sweden has not "grabbed any government funding". "Ung pirat" simply applied as any other youth group can (and as the other "youth parties" do). The phrasing in the article may lead people who are not aware of this to believe that the Pirate party has used influence in order to acquire funding in some illegitimate manner.

If anyone is curious about the multi-party system there are currently 8 parties from Sweden in the EU parliament. (All but the Pirate party are also represented in the Swedish government.)

EDIT: Michael mentions the low voter turnout, which in the case of Sweden was ~43% (and it's about the same for other EU countries apparently). That's roughly half of what's normal in a national election here.

EDIT2: Regarding the "fringeness" of the Pirate party they got more votes now than 3 of the parties which are currently in the Swedish government.

As a counterbalance to the IFPI I like the idea of a Pirate Party. I just wouldn't want these guys in complete control - intellectual property (copyrights, etc) have an appropriate place in society. I just think that the balance needs to be restored - The Beatles, Mickey Mouse, etc aren't entitled to perpetual copyright. They deserve to earn money for what they do, just not forever.

Their ideas may be good, I haven't gone over their agenda in detail, but the name is a very poor choice. It seems to me that they've forfeited their long term legitimacy in an effort to ride a trend. They've labeled themselves as agitators and nothing more.

I wouldn't vote for a "Pirate Party", but I might very well vote for an "Intellectual Freedom Party".

Germany has 99 seats, which would suggest a little over 1% of the vote to get a seat, proportionally. Is that not the case? It seems to match the results though, as I don't see any German parties with less than 5 members.

Originally posted by guises:They've labeled themselves as agitators and nothing more.

The labelling comes from Big Content. How many times have you read post here on Ars about the incorrect definition ?

quote:

I wouldn't vote for a "Pirate Party", but I might very well vote for an "Intellectual Freedom Party".

I think people can see that this is what they are about and not about hijacking ships. To consider that 7.1% of the Swedish population is fring and/or does not know the difference or what the stakes are is actually pretty insulting.

Originally posted by doormat:As a counterbalance to the IFPI I like the idea of a Pirate Party. I just wouldn't want these guys in complete control - intellectual property (copyrights, etc) have an appropriate place in society. I just think that the balance needs to be restored - The Beatles, Mickey Mouse, etc aren't entitled to perpetual copyright. They deserve to earn money for what they do, just not forever.

Agreed. Of course, with the damage that has been done already, it would take a significant amount of time and power to restore the balance to a sensible place. And with industry lobbying, I honestly think that constant support of these groups would be needed to maintain any sort of balance. (Right now, the fat kid is on the seesaw with no one on the other side.)

You get strange party candidates and independents at the local and county levels in the United States, but it does not go beyond that due to the winner-take-all system. If you got 4% of the vote that would not matter much in the United States.

I live in Massachusetts, I always vote and I always vote Republican, and no Republican ever gets elected ever. I have no voice period - why do I even bother going to the poll?

It was only a matter of time before someone asked if a winner-take-all or proportional representation system is better. Well? Which is it?

Note: If a proportional representation system was implemented in the United States, the US Senate would still only have Republicans and Democrats. Because of the nature of the way senators are elected, only one is up for election in any given state at a time (except in rare instances). Not so with representatives.

I actually think proportional representation is a good idea, but its not a "higher" form of democracy.

Democracy is defined as a system of government by the people, therefore the the more people who can have a say in outcomes proportionate to the degree they're affected by them the higher the form of democracy (the highest form of democracy being participatory democracy). Therefore proportional representation is a higher form of democracy because it gives more people more say.

Plurality voting is not only a very low form of democracy, it's debatable it even is democracy. So it's not very difficult to find higher forms of democracy.

quote:

Plurality voting has some advantages in that it keeps crazy fringe parties out (making our government more stable)

Then I'm sure then you'll be able to point me to examples of countries that have introduced proportional representation and brought about the apocalypse of "instability." I'm sure you'll even be able to explain how having the Swedish Pirate Party in EU parliament will bring about the apocalypse of "instability."

Well, it won't of course because what you actually mean by "stability" is status quo. Slavery was quite a stable system too, until democracy brought about it's downfall.

Democracy is not about protecting the status quo. It's not about creating what you think is a good government. It's a about creating "our" government. Government of the people.

Plurality voting gives the advantage to the status quo, to propagandists and Machiavellian politicians, because it routinely disenfranchises huge swaths of people (78% in one of my above examples) meaning the propagandists only need to concentrate on a small proportion of the population to gain power, just as they have for decades in both the U.S. and Britain.

On the German vote: You need a minimum of 5% to get any seats in parliament. So 0.9 percent, while roughly the equivalent of one seat, won't give the Pirate Party a seat. They are entitled to government funds, though (0.5% threshold there).

PR enfranchises voters, but the cost is that you don't get a local MP and can result in strange alliances of power (since it is hard to get a single-party majority in parliament). First-past-the-post make politcs more local, since you get to decide on and lobby your local MP. PR uses party lists, which are often unpopular sine they allow big parties to force unpopular candidates into positions of power.

Neither system is perfect. Personally, I like the single-transferable-vote system (it's local and you don't waste your vote) but some people don't since it is seen as a 'negative' election of the least-hated.

I don't see why locality is important (or a good thing); all I've seen out of strong local roots is the geographical equivalent of the effects special-interest lobbying and pork-barreling national legislation (Bridge to nowhere, agricultural subsidies (corn syrup anyone?), tax breaks to companies to attract investment, etc). Some of these are arguably good and increase economic activity but the vast majority create huge inefficiencies in the system.

Originally posted by d_jedi:Is this parliament based on a proportional representation system? My understanding is such a system allows all sorts of fringe groups to have a voice (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable).

No no no, it doesn't allow fringe groups to have a voice. It is the voters who allow a group to have a voice. Proportional representation is a neutral form of voting that is not substantially biased towards or against any parties.

First-past-the-post, which is used in some UK and US elections, has a huge bias towards larger parties, and actively prevents smaller parties from taking seats in parliament, and can have a huge influence on the number of seats larger parties can take.

I'm going to use the Scottish Parliament elections as an example for two of my points - that PR doesn't necessarily mean seats for small parties, and that the FPTP system can change an election result. I'm not going to explain the Additional Member system, but see the link above.

When there's no real prospect of a change of government, small parties will garner a larger share of the vote, both because of protest votes and because they actually represent the opinions of some of the electorate. However, when a change of government is desired by the electorate, they will tend to unite around one opposition party. We saw this in the Scottish Parliament in 2007, where voters flocked to the Scottish Nationalists and all non-mainstream parties except the Greens were wiped out (the Greens lost most of their seats).

What's really shocking is that the vote could easily have gone dramatically the other way if FPTP had been the sole system used. In the 2007 constituency vote, the SNP received more votes than Labour, but Labour was awarded a majority of the constituency seats available. Labour wouldn't even have needed a coalition to form a majority government. This strikes me as incredibly unfair, and an indictment of the FPTP system.

There has been an unproportional amount of articles about Sweden lately. There has been a lot of talk around the world about The Pirate Bay, but who cares about a mandate or two? I'm getting bored with this writer's giddy anticipation.

Originally posted by Redglittercoffin:There has been an unproportional amount of articles about Sweden lately. There has been a lot of talk around the world about The Pirate Bay, but who cares about a mandate or two? I'm getting bored with this writer's giddy anticipation.

For anyone interested in copyright and the direction it is going - and Ars is, obviously, a site that is interested - this is huge news.

The actual result, "a mandate or two", will not change the world, but this election shows that a lot of people care, and care quite a bit, about this issue.

In a time of world economic crisis, hundreds of thousands of people voted for a party whose sole agenda is copyright reform! That means that, at least in Sweden, copyright is no longer just a lobbyist going "here is a couple thousand Franklins, bada-bing bada-boom, copyright is 200 years longer"; it is officially an Issue. As it should be.

Originally posted by Redglittercoffin:There has been an unproportional amount of articles about Sweden lately. There has been a lot of talk around the world about The Pirate Bay, but who cares about a mandate or two? I'm getting bored with this writer's giddy anticipation.

For anyone interested in copyright and the direction it is going - and Ars is, obviously, a site that is interested - this is huge news.

The actual result, "a mandate or two", will not change the world, but this election shows that a lot of people care, and care quite a bit, about this issue.

In a time of world economic crisis, hundreds of thousands of people voted for a party whose sole agenda is copyright reform! That means that, at least in Sweden, copyright is no longer just a lobbyist going "here is a couple thousand Franklins, bada-bing bada-boom, copyright is 200 years longer"; it is officially an Issue. As it should be.

Actually the main question for the PP is privacy and stop to all the surveillance laws. Copyright and patent reform is there but not seen as the main question. (about 30% said that copyright is the main question)

On the other hand a lot of those laws are coupled as media industry lobbies to be able to use it for tracking file sharers.

Originally posted by Eraserhead:Plurality voting has some advantages in that it keeps crazy fringe parties out (making our government more stable) and allows you to have a representative MP who only represents a small area.

Indeed; I think it's an unfortunate consequence of the party list voting system that the electorate have absolutely no connection with the European Parliament. I was one of the few who could be bothered to vote last Thursday, but to be honest I have no idea who I elected (the constituency 'London' is just too large, and the party list system means whoever gets elected is only tangentially related to my vote) and the chances are I'll not knowingly hear anything about them ever again. It's this sort of disconnect - which is a direct result of the party list PR system - which leads to the poor turnouts we see time and again in these elections.

I'm tending in favour of PR, but I have to say the single transferable vote (STV) system seems to me to provide the best solution, giving PR but maintaining the benefits of direct election (and direct accountability) of candidates in reasonably sized constituencies.

This is officially a good thing (TM). I wouldn't care much for them to be in any government because politics is a complicated business. But if this is the way to get politicians to do what most people want on a small issue then its a good thing. The ideal situation would be that the big parties see that this is an issue people want handled differently and adopt some of the positions. Shouldn't hurt them much.

Germany has 99 seats, which would suggest a little over 1% of the vote to get a seat, proportionally. Is that not the case? It seems to match the results though, as I don't see any German parties with less than 5 members.

No, when the voting is over you sum up all the parties that reached above the threshold, and split the seats among them. For example, the German pirate party got 0.9% which means those votes are completely disregarded when distributing the parliament seats.

quote:

I just wouldn't want these guys in complete control

That's not the point of the Pirate Party, and there's no realistic chance that they end up with a majority anywhere. This election was about the EU parliament only, and even if they got 100% of the Swedish votes, they'd still only be a tiny minority in the EU parliament.

Why? Because political parties were never really suppose to be recognized by the government.

There is no real mention or dealings with political parties in our constitution. No majority seat, no minority seats. No funding of political parties. All that shit is completely made up and abritrary and is designed specifically to keep both parties in power and unchallenged by any third party.

One of the more horrible aspects is things were you have to register your political party and vote in pre-election elections. All these things are just political theater.. completely controlled by the democrates and rebulicans as a way to attract attention and gain political momentum.. But it is all made up.. each state has established funding and controls and all these complex rules governing these sort of pre-elections elections and its all just bullshit.

But of course everybody is so brain washed that they think that this is a normal part of how you elect a president or congressmen. They don't realize its mostly for show and they think that its a opportunity to get their voices heard.

In fact there was serious debate during the founding of the government whether to allow political parties at all.

Most people in the USA could not tell you how things are suppose to work...

There are 3 branches of government:

1. Executive branch2. Legislative branch3. Judicial branch

And they are designed to counter the negative effects of democracy as much as possible while keeping the government weak.

There is only one branch of government that is elected by vote. So in the USA only 1/3 is designed to be democratically elected.

And that is the legaslative branch. The legislative branch is divided up into House of Representatives. and Congress.

The house is designed to be sized according to population percentages... So they are designed to be actually completely populist in nature.

Congress is designed to reflect the number and physical size of states and designed to reflect the political and business power bases in each state.

And that is what is suppose to be going on.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the President is designed to be elected by the people.

The Supreme Court is appointed for life, more or less.

The President is designed to be elected by State governments. The whole "lets elect Obama" or whatever is just a complete cop-out on the side of state legislation body becuase they don't want to be looked at poorly if they elect a unpopular president to office.

-------------------

In recent years the Democrates and Republicans have pushed very hard to limit the ability of anybody to challenge them politically.

The biggest and most blatant example of this is the so-called "election finance reform".

What this has effectively done is that it has eliminated the ability for people using private sources of capital to be able to campaign for office in any major election six or so months prior to any election.

That is if I am running for office I can't use my own money to pay for ad time or get people to campaign on my behalf prior to any election.

Now months prior to election I can use private money, but unless I have millions and millions of dollars to burn then I can't keep up with the democrates and republicans that now start ramping up for elections for upwards to 2 years prior to a election.

So the most important time for people to be notified of a third party would be weeks prior to a election. However that is effectively illegal now.

Sure you can use public funding and media outlets can use their own money, but the way things are setup is that you need a rather large percentage of the previous election to get funding for the next.

The barriers are purposely set very very high.

And this is a system that was designed to not really be party-centric.

Its very pathetic and helps explain why there is so much wrongness.

The whole presidential thing is a complete distraction. The amount of power a president to get things done by himself is very very limited.

It is infact congress that decides how money is spent, who gets the money, and what laws and initiatives get passed... yet people are fooled by the political parties into thinking that the president is the important election... when the president is not even elected by popular vote.

Originally posted by Christiaan:Calling it a "winner-take-all" all system is a misnomer. They take all all right but they're not winners. They just happen to have the largest bloc of votes.

For example, even with a record turnout the Democrats and Obama were elected with only roughly 34% support of registered voters (that's not even eligible voters, which is a larger group).

Labour in Britain gained power in one recent election on the basis of about 22% of eligible voters.

Calling that democracy is a farce.

Hogwash. They were given the chance to vote and chose not to. Besides, all the statistics for the 2008 election show a ~60% voter turnout in the US. Looks like you're supporting your arguments with statistics pulled out of your ass.

Why? Because political parties were never really suppose to be recognized by the government.

There is no real mention or dealings with political parties in our constitution. No majority seat, no minority seats. No funding of political parties. All that shit is completely made up and arbitrary and is designed specifically to keep both parties in power and unchallenged by any third party.

This is very true, but not exactly something the Founding Fathers didn't expect - there have been political parties from the very beginning, they've just gotten more defined and more tradition has associated with them as time has gone on.

quote:

There is only one branch of government that is elected by vote. So in the USA only 1/3 is designed to be democratically elected.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the President is designed to be elected by the people....

The Supreme Court is appointed for life, more or less.

The President is designed to be elected by State governments. The whole "lets elect Obama" or whatever is just a complete cop-out on the side of state legislation body becuase they don't want to be looked at poorly if they elect a unpopular president to office.

Also true. But you forgot that senators are intended to be elected by state governments as well. Thus the masses only get half of 1/3 of the lawmaking power. However, you can't really argue that "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct" doesn't allow for the possibility of a popular vote. I'd be interested in seeing how it was handled in the first few elections...

Also, don't forget that the VP was specifically everyone's second choice for president, usually an opponent to the Pres.

quote:

The biggest and most blatant example of this is the so-called "election finance reform".

What this has effectively done is that it has eliminated the ability for people using private sources of capital to be able to campaign for office in any major election six or so months prior to any election.

That is if I am running for office I can't use my own money to pay for ad time or get people to campaign on my behalf prior to any election.

This is debateable. The idea is to elect the most popular person, not the best funded. But the way advertising works these days, the best funded person tends to be the most popular. EFR may not have been the best solution, but something was needed to prevent the decline to a plutocracy...

Personally, I think the best solution is to change the voting system, but not as per any of the aforementioned systems (quoted below).

quote:

Originally posted by Camp Freddie:PR enfranchises voters, but the cost is that you don't get a local MP and can result in strange alliances of power (since it is hard to get a single-party majority in parliament). First-past-the-post make politcs more local, since you get to decide on and lobby your local MP. PR uses party lists, which are often unpopular sine they allow big parties to force unpopular candidates into positions of power.

Neither system is perfect. Personally, I like the single-transferable-vote system (it's local and you don't waste your vote) but some people don't since it is seen as a 'negative' election of the least-hated.

My preference is for approval voting. AV is similar to single-transferable-vote, but instead of ranking all the candidates, you just get to vote yes or no for each one. As with standard plurality voting, whoever gets the most votes wins. But you have much more flexibility in the vote - you can vote for everyone except one person ("Anyone but Bush"). You could vote for just one person ("I only trust Obama"). You could vote for a smaller third-party candidate and a major party one ("I prefer the Libertarian candidate, but I'd rather have Kerry than another term of Bush"). You don't have to prioritize your choices, as in STV, and for all other purposes, it's the standard, simple, single-vote plurality system. Counting gets slightly more complex, since the total votes for everyone should always be more than the number of voters, but it eliminates the issues with counting overvotes (no such thing exists any more), and makes undervotes less likely (no votes in a race = "no" vote for everyone).

Originally posted by jdietz:In proportional systems, who decides who holds the seats that have been won?

The voters directly as well as the party. It usually works like this (and obviously there are differences between countries):

-The voter votes for a party on the national level and a local district representative. Somtimes these are two separate votes, one vote for the national percentage, one vote for the local representative; sometimes it gets muddled together (If you vote for local Guy A, his party gets automatically a vote on the national level).

-The interesting thing is then how these two wishes of the voter (local guy + nation-wide party) get combined:

-Before the election, the party has to submit a numbered list of representatives, which will get called in order to parliament. This list is obviously published.

-Now comes the peculiar thing about PR elections. Ever noticed how in all PR systems, the number of seats in parliament is varying between elections? That's due to the nature of this dual system.

-Each winner of the local district gets a direct mandate to parliament. This is a direct, do-not-pass-any-party-lists, way into parliament. Even if this representative isn't on the official party list, he will get directly into parliament.

-The number of direct mandates will get substracted from the number of seats assigned to the party due to the national vote. How this is done in detail does vary a bit between countries, but all countries have provisions for the following interesting case:

-It can happen that a party has very strong local support, winning more direct mandates than assigned via the national vote. Since the direct mandate is essentially sacrosanct, new additional seats in parliament will be created to accomadate all direct mandates. This is the reason for the varying number of representatives in parliament between elections.

Hence a PR system combines both worlds: getting popular politicians directly into parliament, as well as getting decent representation of the public support of the varying parties into parliament.